SIT DOWN, HAVE A DRINK, RELAX.

Federal Election 2 July 2016

Soon the Polls will close and the counting will begin. Sometime tonight the results will be in and we will know what sort of Government we will have for the next 3 years. Will Labor be victorious or will The Libs be the ones that are popping the champagne corks? Will there be a Hung Parliament? All will be revealed in the next few hours so take one last deep breath, Pour yourself A drink or 12 and have some snacks at your side.

894 thoughts on “Federal Election 2 July 2016”

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Why can’t Postal votes be processed as soon as they arrive? The results don’t have to be made public, and even then, the results could simply be kept under lock and key if there’s concerns that revealing the contents could affect the final result.

In fact it could be done as a kind of practice exercise for AEC vote counters for the actual night. They can spend the week up to the election counting the postal votes and use that experience for the Saturday night where the polling booths come in.

But the main thing is that most of the results would come in on the night, and we won’t be in this position where there’s 1 million votes still coming in that obviously have a different result to that which occurred on election day that completely changes the result of the election that won’t be resolved until next week.

no votes can be touched until the close of polling. the poll ends on 6pm on the general polling day and nothing, note nothing gets opened before hand and that is iron clad. anything opened, moved or anything has to be done with opportunity for scrutineers too, as i understand it Doing anything with a vote, other than locking it away, before close of polls is ver boten, forbidden, not allowed and gets your fingers chopped off.

Ugh, okay. So yes, that makes sense for vote security. But cripes I am so sick of these simultaneous elections occurring. The election where 70% of the votes get counted on the day, and this other election that’s counted over the next two weeks that goes around 10% better for the LNP.

I vaguely remember hearing yesterday some Brit (former?) politician describing Theresa May as a very difficult person to deal with – capping the comment by stating that he had worked with Mrs Thatcher.

I think it is a totally delicious article, and would appreciate CTar’s comments.

The Conservative party doesn’t do carriage clocks for people like Michael Gove. They just get a note reading “You have outlived your usefulness” and a five minute head-start on the hounds.

Still, let’s fire up Walkaway by Cast and watch a montage of Gove’s best bits. First, Michael positioned himself as the man who had put his country before his friend David. Next he was the man who’d put his country before his friend Boris. Then he was the man who’d put his country before his long-time special adviser. Finally, he graduated to being the man who’d put his country before what he apparently deemed the socially backward Conservative membership.

The trouble was that each time Michael did this, everyone else popped him back in the file marked “disloyal shit”. Just walkaway, walkaway, walkaway…

Yes, the results are in: Theresa May 199, Andrea Leadsom 84, Michael Gove 46. Without wishing to go out on a limb here, it seems his parliamentary colleagues have had enough of the expert-slasher Michael Gove. He has emerged from the Houses of Parliament to salute the assured advent of a “female prime minister”, and explain how proud he was to have spent the past week contributing to the debate by arguing for the most vulnerable. Unfortunately, the most vulnerable has now been eliminated.

Still, at least Gove has achieved his repeatedly stated ambition of not wanting to be prime minister. It looked touch-and-go for a bit, what with there being one key group Michael had yet to formally alienate in the course of his treachery accumulator: namely, Conservative party members.

His wife, journalist Sarah Vine, is said to be also into deep-sixing people she’s worked with.

Excuse me while I go and continue my impersonation of the laughing policeman brought on by reading this…

Billionaire Andrew Forrest has lost a court appeal aimed at preventing sand mining on his family cattle station in Western Australia’s Pilbara region.

In a 2012 objection, the mining magnate’s private company Forrest and Forrest Pty Ltd said Yarri’s plans would adversely affect pastoral operations, sterilise and degrade the land, and cause environmental damage, including to the river.

One of the trivial little items Bob Katter discussed with Fizza yesterday was the Galilee Basin railway, necessary if the Adani/Carmichael mining disaster is to go ahead, but otherwise not needed at all. As Adani has all but abandoned their plans to destroy Queensland and now favours investment in solar energy Katter is on a hiding to nowhere with this rubbish.

A reminder of Sauron’s role in Iraq. someone else who should be in dock with Bush , Blah and The Rodent.

Stuchbury even scored a mention in this hall of dishonour. Pity a few journos are not being held up and shamed for the tripe the wrote .

Their master’s voice

Rupert Murdoch argued strongly for a war with Iraq in an interview this week. Which might explain why his 175 editors around the world are backing it too, writes Roy Greenslade

What a guy! You have got to admit that Rupert Murdoch is one canny press tycoon because he has an unerring ability to choose editors across the world who think just like him. How else can we explain the extraordinary unity of thought in his newspaper empire about the need to make war on Iraq?

Most revealing of all was Murdoch’s reference to the rationale for going to war, blatantly using the o-word. Politicians in the United States and Britain have strenuously denied the significance of oil, but Murdoch wasn’t so reticent. He believes that deposing the Iraqi leader would lead to cheaper oil. “The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy…would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.”

…………there cannot be any doubt where its editor, Michael Stutchbury, stands. The daily slogan, “Countdown to war”, suggests that the paper is cheerleading the inevitability of an invasion, as did one of its more militant leaders two weeks ago. “Twelve years of defiance by Hussein show that the old policies of containment no longer work”, said the editorial. “Appeasement is not an option when it comes to dealing with Hussein…Failure to disarm Hussein would make the world a much more dangerous place.” On Saturday, the paper called on readers to “accept that the US is not the aggressor on the world stage, and that the real threat to the safety of the Australian people comes from Baghdad and Pyongyang”, and took a sideswipe at anti-war demonstrators.

Just remember – this is not support for a Turnbull government. The indies who agree to do this will still vote as they think best on everything else. Despite all the MSM myths, this. was all Qakeshott and Windsor promised Julia Gillard in 2010. Nothing more. Just not voting to block supply and not supporting a motion of no confidence unless it was due to something serious. It came with a lot of benefits for their electorates, so I hope Katter, Wilkie, McGowan and anyone else making this agreement have managed to wangle the same sort of deal.

I have a friend and his partner who are just outside of Dallas right now. They left a few days ago on the direct flight from Sydney.

He is an ex-cop, quite senior at the end. He’s recently retired with a nice old-fashioned defined benefits scheme, which has set him up for life.

He is the son of an American serviceman, who met his mother while over here during WW2. Turns out he has a lot of rellies in Texas. And they are just about all cops.

He’s sent me photos of how gun-happy they all seem to be. Guns in the bedroom, guns in the living room, guns on rack in the pickup or the boot of the car, even guns in the toilet. They have dozens of guns, of all types. Armalites everywhere, shotguns, 45s, Magnums, little “ladies’ guns” and yes, even their kids have their own guns. It’s like Fantasyland for the NRA.

This one one of the photos. My friend’s comment:

“I searched everywhere at home to find the picture of the gun in Craig’s car and finally here it is – it is his assault rifle and he keeps it plus other bits and pieces in the boot in case they are needed when he is working.”

With the shootings in Dallas, and the number of police involved, I’m wondering whether they are not finally getting their wish, often expressed to my mate, to have a shootout with “the Niggas”.

Oh, and of course, Obama is persona non gratis. They tell my friend that if he was to ever come to Dallas you’d have to queue up to be the assassin.

It’s infected my mate quite a bit, too. He goes over there more and more often. Several times a year.Last time we saw them for a meal, all he could talk about was his trip and how he’d get to play with his cousins’ guns when he got there. This includes machine guns. When I started laughing he got quite defensive, and told me about the time he had to discharge his pump action “shottie” when some neighbours became a bit threatening. He was annoyed that he had to surrender it to John Howard’s buyback scheme, back in 1997. It was the nearest we’d ever come to having an argument. I hadn’t realized how serious he’d become about guns.

All of his rellies have been wounded, one of them quite seriously, “in the line of duty” and recovered enough to go back to work. Two of them have shot and killed people, also “in the line of duty”.

Judging from the amount of gunfire in the couple of video clips I’ve seen so far, there may be quite a lot of “duty” on its way for them, and I hope my mate stays inside and very “peaceable like”.

I’d never go back, except perhaps to Hawaii, which is really lovely (particularly the island of K’uai) and is less tolerant of guns and all that “Bad Guys v. Good Guys” stuff. Hawaii has the lowest gun ownership in America and the 3rd lowest murder rate per capita (next to Vermont and New Hampsire) at 0.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. Also not a real long flight to get there.

By contrast, Texas has a 10 times higher rate of gun murders, and 5 times the gun ownership ratio – just about the highest in America.

As for the rest of America outside Hawaii, they can stuff it. Never again.

Hawai’i also just legislated to have the FBI keep a register of all gun owners. NRA shat itself but I believe the governor kept his nerve. Didn’t see any guns for sale in Walmart I went to but I bought a multi-tool knife at an Outdoor Authority store and was confronted by a wall of guns.